


This earth shall have a feeling

by regshoe



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Genre: Gen, Magic, Portentous Ravens, faerie - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-17
Updated: 2020-01-17
Packaged: 2021-04-25 10:28:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22294273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/regshoe/pseuds/regshoe
Summary: Stephen Black and the Raven King, from the beginning.
Relationships: Stephen Black & John Uskglass | The Raven King
Comments: 6
Kudos: 13





	This earth shall have a feeling

**Author's Note:**

> The relationship between Stephen and the Raven King is in some ways one of the most important in the book—and so much is suggested about it but so little actually explained. I thought it'd be an interesting thing to write a fic about...

_1434_

It was no grand procession, no ceremonial leave-taking. He went quietly in the night—as he had gone many times before, to travel to England or to his third kingdom, or to go off adventuring somewhere on those strange paths that magicians know. The people here, however, knew some things better even than magicians did, and one of the things they knew tonight was that this time was different from those that had been before.

The sky was dark above the hill, and the cold bright stars of the Otherlands shone down through the tangled branches of winter trees. The walls were black in gloomy shadow. They were changed from what they had been a short time ago: cracks had appeared in many of the stones, and thick green moss grew over and along them. The stones on either side of the doorway had begun to crumble and fall, forming a little scree-slope at the King's feet. The two stone figures that guarded the doorway seemed to be sinking back into the shadows.

'Already the world is changing,' said the figure who stood in the doorway. 'We are going into the night, and the world is full of grief for the old King.' His voice was mild, but there was a great sorrow behind it.

The old King said nothing. A sharp, chill wind was blowing from the ridge of hills that stood against the horizon, and his face was turned towards it.

'So,' said the fairy, at last. 'The King leaves us—but he shall return.' He seemed to be speaking more to himself than to the man who stood before him. '_King in a strange country_ he was, and will be. We have that comfort.' Then, almost as an afterthought, he added, 'Farewell.'

'Farewell,' said the King, and there was something like grief in his fine face.

The fairy nodded once, then turned and disappeared through the doorway of the _brugh_. The King pulled the dark folds of his cloak around him, a shield against the bitter wind, and set out into the night.

_1771_

The narrow street wound down between tottering houses to the river, where the April sun shone bright on the water's surface. A brisk westerly wind played with the sunshine, making little glittering lines of light along the waves that it picked up and drove onwards towards the sea. It was the first really warm day of that spring, and Ann Howick, amongst several of her neighbours, had taken her knitting out onto the front doorstep to sit and soak up the sunlight.

'Come on, come out here and enjoy the weather!' she shouted back through the open door, the needles in her well-practised fingers not pausing in their motion for a moment as she turned around. 'It'll do you good!'

A face, very like Ann's own although some years younger, appeared in the doorway but moved no further. Will Howick, apprentice carpenter and Ann's brother, evidently had his doubts about the benefits of fresh spring air. He gazed down towards the end of the street, screwing up his dark eyes against the brightness.

'Here, look at that!' he said suddenly, pointing towards the river.

A ship was passing by. This was no uncommon sight on the busy waters of the Tyne, but this was an uncommonly handsome ship: built strongly and on a large scale, with sails of dazzling white, and bows that cut the clear blue water and left streaks of brilliant sunlight in their wake. On that spring day, with a little of ice still in the wind, the ship looked like a reminder of summer.

'She is a bonny sight,' said Ann, looking up from her work. 'The Penlaw. I saw her building down at Howdon not three weeks ago. They told me she was bound for Jamaica.'

'The Penlaw?' Will pulled his gaze away from the ship and looked at Ann with some interest. 'Funny name for a ship.'

'Well, lots of things get named after old John and his kingdoms,' she said, quite truthfully. 'Happen they wanted to remember where he came from, too.'

Something else moved along the line of the river, behind the great ship: a black bird, winging its way along towards the sea. Its dark shape was a little out of harmony with the bright, brisk day around it; it seemed to belong to another world than this one of waves and sunlight.

Swift and sure as the ship was, the bird was faster, and soon caught it up.

'Here, Ann, look—it's old John's banner!' The bird had passed in front of the ship, where for one moment its black cruciform shape was silhouetted against the white sails. 'That's good luck, that is. She'll have smooth sailing to Jamaica.' Will looked with approval on the ship thus blessed by fortune.

Ann had looked up from her knitting, but before she could see it the bird had overtaken the ship and passed on, out towards the river's mouth and the open sea. It occurred to her to wonder why a land bird should be going in that direction—or how it had come there at all, for its kind were scarcer every year on Tyneside in these days of bounties, guns and nest-raids. She shook her head: doubtless the bird had as much reason to be there as any bird had to be anywhere.

The Penlaw, its crew being unconcerned with these questions, kept on its course towards the sea.

_1784_

The library of L— Hall, the country seat of Sir William Pole, was, like the rest of that elegant and well-proportioned residence, a large and high-ceilinged room, airy and full of light even on this grey autumn day. Beyond the high windows the tree-branches were tossed back and forth by a wind full of the glee of its return to England's skies after the long calm summer, and the leaves whirled in great clouds past the panes; but within all was still, well-ordered and quiet. Nothing disturbed the silence except, now and again, the sound made by the boy in the great armchair in turning over a page of his book.

This book, a great heavy volume, was out of all proportion to the boy, who was eleven or twelve and not tall for his age. It was balanced across his knees, with one cover resting against the arm of the chair. Now and again as he read a smile, or a frown, or a look of sudden sorrow, would pass across his face.

Sir William had always encouraged the interest young Stephen took in reading and study; the boy would need something, after all, to set against the great disadvantages he must face in life, and it was no little advantage that he might get from such accomplishments. He was especially pleased to see him taking an interest in history, which was a favourite hobby of his own.

This book, however, puzzled Stephen—as others on the same subject had done before. He had read several histories of English magic—the familiar schoolroom books which every child in the kingdom must study, but also a few rather more obscure and advanced works. He had read, in histories of mediaeval Northern England, accounts of the great battles fought by the Raven King against the French, the Scots and his various other enemies. He had even read Shakespeare's 'The Raven King'1—but still, he felt, he had not understood something which he ought to understand.

The book told another bloody tale of battle. The descriptions of the King's wild magic, and of the brave deeds of his captains and his fairy-servants, were wonderful—though Stephen could not help feeling sorry for the poor Frenchmen or Scotsmen who saw that great champion of a thousand ravens bearing down on them on its broad black wings, to their certain defeat at the hands of John Uskglass's army. Perhaps that was what so disturbed his mind. The magic was not only brutal as battle must be, it was strange and it was eerie. The strangeness was not obscured by even the driest of written histories; it was as though the words on the page hid something behind them that kept trying to poke through their paper skin.

The feeling he had was very much like that of being in an empty room at night, when out of the darkness and the shadows in the darkness there seemed to be some presence, watching him—a feeling that no amount of calm, rational thought could ever quite dispel.

Stephen rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand—they were growing a little weary—and looked up from the page to the high windows, where the wind's wild dance had not abated in the slightest. To Stephen's tired mind the movement of the leaves and branches seemed to merge with the strange story told by the book; he could imagine that the wind had blown out of Faerie, and was bearing the leaves away back there.

'Oh, you are quite right!' said Sir William, when Stephen tried to explain all this to him. 'None of us understands why John Uskglass did anything that he did—from his conquest of the North to his departure from it. He is an eternal mystery.'

'It is not that,' said Stephen, frowning. His words were not adequate to explain his meaning. 'There is something else, in his magic. Something behind the words.' Then, half to himself, 'If only I could read it too...'

Sir William looked at him—curiously, but indulgently. 'Well,' he said at last, 'I would not worry yourself about it. English magic is a perplexing thing, and after all, you are not an Englishman—perhaps it is natural that you should not understand it.'

A few days later, when the wind had calmed down to the level of a mere brisk breeze, Stephen set out on a walk around the estate with Piper, his favourite of Sir William's spaniels, scampering around his feet. About a mile from the house they rounded the corner of a little copse of ash trees that grew on a gently sloping hillside, where there was a picturesque view over towards the far side of the river. Here Stephen stopped to catch his breath and admire the scene.

A flock of black birds were gathering in a field across the valley. They beat their long wings slowly, circling one by one the place where their companions stood before landing to join them; there was something of menace in their solemn movements. Their cries, floating across to Stephen on the wind, were deep and harsh—nothing like the familiar chattering of the jackdaws that built their nests in the chimney-stacks. As he watched, the whole flock took flight together as though at some hidden signal, and set off along the river as one great bird.

Stephen shivered and turned away. The voices of the birds echoed after him.

_1816_

The silver knife clinked against its fellows as Stephen replaced it in the tray. He took up another knife from the set laid out on the table before him and began to polish it, working steadily and methodically although rather slowly.

His enchantment was heavy upon him today—it had been so ever since he had returned from last week's journey to Yorkshire—and he was not often able to think about anything in such detail as he was once used to. In Yorkshire, however, it had been different, if only for a few moments. When he had heard the prophecy, the world had changed.

He thought once more of the strange painted vagabond who had told it to him. For all that the man's clothes were ragged, his hair dirty and his accent uncouth, there had been something almost grand in the sheer conviction with which he had spoken. If what the gentleman with the thistledown hair had told Stephen was true, his words were the words of the Raven King... and he had known Stephen, had recognised him, had spoken of the loss of his name.

'Mr Black? Are you unwell?'

'Hmm?' Stephen raised his head to find that the polishing-cloth had slipped from his hand. John Longridge, the cook, was standing in the doorway of the butler's pantry, frowning with evident concern. 'Oh, I am quite well—it is nothing. What is the matter?'

John Longridge had, he explained, come about the orders for that night's dinner (at which Sir Walter was to entertain Lord Portishead and a few other friends). When the necessary directions had been given, he added, 'And, Mr Black, you won't mind my saying—if your old trouble is distressing you again, you will speak of it to me, won't you? I have always found that sharing one's low spirits with another does a little to ease the mind, if it cannot dispel the trouble.'

Stephen almost smiled. For all his endless gloom and misery, the man was kind, and meant well. 'Thank you,' he said, 'although it is rather the reverse which troubles me now—a thought of some hope, which I do not quite trust or understand.'

John Longridge frowned. 'Oh, I wouldn't put any trust in it, if I were you, Mr Black,' he said. 'Hope always does turn out untrustworthy in the end, in my experience.' He shook his head, turned and left the room.

He must be right, Stephen decided. What the gentleman had said was true, and the prophecy had nothing to do with him. It had been some mistake—or had never been anything at all. For, after all, how could such a vagabond as the man who had spoken to him be the messenger of a king—or the message intended for such a man as himself?

_Otherwise_

The great room was a _brugh_, a fairy dwelling inside a hollow hill; of that there could be no doubt, for the shape of its walls was that of the hill above it, and those walls were not of brick or cut stones but of hewn rock and earth. Let it not be thought, however, that this was such a barren, crumbling place as we hear about in the old fairy-stories. It was quite the opposite. Those curving stone walls were smooth and polished, and hung with brightly coloured banners and with tapestries depicting crowds of fairies taking part in joyful celebrations, or else in useful and industrious work. The room was well lit by a series of ornate lanterns that hung above the heads of the assembled people, with magical flames set within them; and their light revealed no neglected crack in the stones or dusty corner of the floor, for there was none. And the King's entrance was heralded by a pair of trumpeters in handsome uniforms, who blew a smart salute on instruments carved from animals' horns, polished and shining.2

The King took his place on the throne, and his fairy-subjects bowed their heads before him.

When the King had greeted them in return, he proceeded to the day's business. This consisted of a dispute between two fairies from the outlying country of Lost-hope (that being the rather incongruous name of this kingdom), who now stepped forward to present their cases.

'The enchanted horses belonging to Mary Hawkmoth,' said one of the fairies, 'have been causing trouble on Heart's-ease Meadow—your own royal land—for many months. They have pulled my crops up by the roots and destroyed the ground with their trampling hooves; and whenever I have tried to drive them away by magic, they call me a villain and ignore all my spells! Now they have beguiled my songbirds with their enchantment, so that the birds have all left me and I have no lovely music to hear in my house. They and their owner must be punished!'

The other fairy listened to this with undisguised contempt. 'Barleycorn Henry is a liar and a scoundrel,' she now said. 'He treated those songbirds cruelly—hunting them for sport, and stealing the eggs from their nests. If they wanted to leave his lands, and my horses helped them to do so, it is no fault of mine. Besides, my horses go where they like, as they have done for four thousand years; I am not surprised that they ignore a villain's attempts to drive them away. Henry ought to know this.'

The King heard them both with solemn attention. When they had finished speaking, he sent them both out of the room for a time while he deliberated on how to resolve the dispute. The remaining fairies waited anxiously to hear his judgement; in the short time for which he had ruled here, they had learnt how well his judgement was to be trusted, but none could think how he would solve this problem.

Presently, he called the two fairies back in.

'Heart's-ease Meadow,' he began, 'was either very ill-named, or has undergone a sad decline. For it is no meadow, but a miserable, chilly bog, where all is gloomy and nothing bright grows. But it need not be so. The ground is good, and with some attention to drainage and management there might be a happy meadow along the river, and rich fields of corn on the land towards the hills. It has been a wish of mine for some time that this might be done.

'I suspect,' he added, 'that this is why Mary's horses dislike the place so much. They are grieved by the unhappy state of the land, and by the thought of what it could be.

'Therefore my judgement is this. Henry, if you are to remain lord of Heart's-ease Meadow you must go to work improving the land: clear the streams choked by weeds, plant meadow-grasses and flowers, draw down dragonflies and mayflies along the river. And you must not mistreat the songbirds, or any other living things of the place. If I hear that you have done so again, you will not stay there to torment them longer. And Mary, as payment for the trouble your horses have caused, you must set them to help Henry in this work. They will turn over the earth to be made new, and pull the carts to bring in the seed for planting corn, and call the birds and insects back with the spells that they can sing. In this way the land will be made good again.'

When he had finished speaking, a murmur arose amongst the fairies; they all whispered to one another what a happy end this was to the case. In the olden days they would scarcely have thought that there could be such enjoyment in a dispute that did not end with the brutal murder of one party by the other; but the prospect of Heart's-ease Meadow once more beautiful and bright, and the enchanted horses engaged in some useful task, was far better.

Mary Hawkmoth and Barleycorn Henry were both satisfied with this settlement of affairs, and left the hall quite as pleased as their fellows.

The King smiled to himself as the fairies filtered out of the hall, passing through the great doors at the far end or down the various side-passages and corridors that led to different parts of the _brugh_, still talking amongst themselves of the morning's excitement. Finally he too left the room, signalling to his heralds that they need not accompany him through the great doors. He wished to be alone for a while, and to wander in the gardens that lay outside the hall in the company of his own thoughts.

A few minutes later he was strolling along a broad gravel path between two flowerbeds. In one of these grew roses the colour of good fortune, and in the other grew lilies that smelt of June sunlight. The air was pleasantly warm, and bees, butterflies and countless other insects flew and fluttered amongst the flowers.

The hill which housed his palace stood high and green against the horizon above him, its slopes clad in bracken and moss. A solitary raven was circling high above its peak; its kind were often seen up there. The King called to it, and heard its answering cry echo across the stones of the hill towards him.

Ever since he had arrived here, he had found that the physical appearance of the place was changeable—almost unreliable. The _brugh_ could be a mound beneath the earth, or a great castle, or a grand house; its aspect viewed from outside did not always correspond with the arrangement of rooms to be found inside. Sometimes it seemed to alter with his own moods, or with the events taking place within its walls. These alterations, though they had seemed strange at first, no longer troubled him; they were simply the land changing the expression of its face, as it were, and the heart of the place was true and constant. He had found, as he became more used to this country, that he could change the shape of the place consciously if he spoke to it in the right words: altering the arrangement of the rooms, encouraging it to take on one aspect rather than another, decorating a room some particular way, and so on.

The King had derived some amusement from this; but real, permanent changes—the kind which he had been so set on making when he arrived, and was now some way towards fixing in place—seemed to require more tangible effort, that of the fairy-inhabitants as well as himself. These lilies and roses, for instance, had been planted after a long consultation with his head gardener as to what varieties of flowers would grow best in such a soil, under a moon of such a colour, nurtured by the song of such birds that lived around the _brugh_, and so on. The land, it seemed, listened to its people and grew as they would see it grow, as long as they listened to it in turn.

The course of the King's walk had brought him in a large circle back round towards the hill, and he now stood again in front of the doors into the hall. And the course of his thoughts seemed to have been leading here also, for here stood the one thing about the place which did not change. On either side of the door there was a stone figure of a man: a young, rather handsome man, his face partly obscured by a high peaked cap with a raven's wing at each side, long stone robes swirling artistically about his feet. He had seen those statues here sometimes before, in the days when Lost-hope was still deserving of its name, but he had not known what they were; they had been half crumbled away beneath the ivy and mosses that hid most of what was left of them from view. Now they were clean and bright as if carved anew. The ivy and the moss were still there, but the ivy trailed over the statues' caps like a circlet, and the moss grew in a soft green slope down the sheltered sides of their stone robes. The change had been no doing of his.

The King looked up: the raven was still circling, far above him, its long-fingered wings and pointed tail sharp against the bright sky of his kingdom.

He thought that, perhaps, he did understand at last what had long eluded him. His eyes followed the bird's path across the sky, and he smiled.

But there were other matters to attend to; the restoration of Lost-hope was a busy and a happy task, and there was always plenty more of it to be done. With one last satisfied look over the garden, the King turned and strode back through the doorway of the _brugh_.

1\. Generally regarded as amongst the weaker of Shakespeare's history plays, but nevertheless much-loved by those who enjoy both magical history and dramatic spectacle, this play calls for some quite complex stage effects in order to create the appearance of the magic used by John Uskglass in battle and at his court. Back

2\. Closer inspection would have revealed these to be the horns of unicorns—a beast of Faerie equally prized for its beauty and its rarity. Back

**Author's Note:**

> I've estimated Stephen's date of birth from his statement that he was free as soon as he was carried off the ship into England—probably a reference to the 1772 legal judgement made in the case of James Somerset, which was widely interpreted to mean that no person could lawfully be enslaved on English soil.
> 
> Ravens, along with other variously inconvenient birds, were persecuted throughout Britain from the seventeenth century onwards, with bounties paid by many parishes for killing them. While it might not have been enough to stop them doing it, I can imagine that the people of John Uskglass's Northern England considered this to be bad luck.


End file.
